Bibingka

Rice cake made with fermented rice flour and coconut milk. It's very slightly sweet with a smoky flavor. It's baked in a banana leaf, and is best experienced literally out of the charcoal oven.

Pili Nuts

The CC had never heard of them before he went to the Philippines.

They have a very high fat content, and are completely unique in taste. The best way to describe it would be like the bastard love child of hazelnuts and brazil nuts.

They are a delicacy because they have an incredibly short shelf-life (that's because of the high fat content which would cause them to go rancid quickly in the hot climate of the Philippines.)



They are frequently blanched and turned into sugary desserts but they could equally well work in a savory dish like any other nut.

Needless to say, they are quite impossible to find outside the Philippines.

The Yikes Meter!

Seen today on a menu, "pad thai tacos".

There is so much wrong with this the CC can't even begin to enumerate. Perhaps there's a reason that those two countries are so far apart?

This is the kinda bullshit that gives "fusion" a bad name.

The Mathematician's Approach to Japanese Cooking

One of the key insights into the nature of cooking is that all cuisines respect the role of limited resources.

One of these limited resources is the number of ingredients that can plausibly be obtained. Traditionally, this has always been limited by the seasons.

If you have limited resources then you might think that you'd have a limited number of dishes. But you'd be wrong!

Humans recognized quite early on that we are easily bored. We crave novelty and variety. The same ol', same ol' was as dreary a millenium ago as it is today.

Traditonally, most cooking was done by women, and women were responsible for coming up with "inventive dishes" each day (to stave off that afore-stated boredom.) They were forced, at the metaphorical gunpoint, to get creative about it.

Lo and behold, the Japanese discovered the combinatorial game. Have a vast amount of ingredients at hand but assemble a dish with just a few and rotate them daily. In fact, outsource a few so that you only need to assemble the rest (the Ricardo-principle applied to cuisine.)

Needless to say, one can't do this with a hard-core mathematician's approach since that would lead to entirely unappetizing dishes so a few rules are imposed on top of that to maintain visual appeal, textural interest and nutritional completeness.

If you understand this then the rules of the so called washoku become entirely obvious.

The rules of go shiki (five colors), go mi (five tastes), go hou (five methods), go kan (five senses) are nothing more than a rulebook to ensure complexity - visual, textural, and nutritional.

The traditional dish is not made with five ingredients. It's closer to between seven and nine in practice. That would imply that you scale as $$n⁷ where n is the number of starting ingredients (and n is very large to start with.) However, the above rules cut down the number of possibilities.

In any case, you are still left with a vast set to play with. Enough to stave off boredom before the seasons change which will alleviate the boredom anyway, and by the time next year rolls around nobody will remember that you played the same game last year!

Radish Salad with Dried Anchovies (Dilis)

This is an entirely inspired dish that you are unlikely to find in any Filipino cookbook. That's because it's a simple side-dish that is unlikely to make it into cookbooks which tend to feature fancier stuff.

It follows the most primitive principles of food. Use fresh ingredients, and touch them up minimally.

The ingredients are simplicity themselves - white radish (daikon), tomatoes, ginger, patis (fish sauce) and vinegar, along with dried anchovies (dilis.)

Served with warm rice, it's the perfect comfort food, and yet texturally complex and nutritionally complete.


Ingredients

4 tomatoes
1/2 radish
4-6 tbsp vinegar (to taste)
2 tbsp patis
4 green chillies (minced)
2 tbsp minced ginger

1/2 cup dried anchovies
salt to taste

Recipe

Cut the radish into paper-thin slices. A mandoline will help here.

Dice the tomatoes roughly.

Mix all the ingredients together except the anchovies.

Mix in the anchovies right before serving (so that they remain crisp and don't turn soggy.)

The Luck Factor

Well, we've had a late blast of summery weather, and the tomatoes were still super-ripe at the farmers' market. The CC got there early, and they were selling them for very cheap so the CC bought a ton, and made tomato sauce out of it. It was promptly frozen for future use.

When life gives you tomatoes, you must make tomato sauce!

Ibus

Rice and coconut milk in palm leaves that is boiled. Eaten with fruits or sugar.

To be fair, the CC appreciated it more than he loved it. Wonder if it would've been different with spicy food.

To be fair, this is a wondrous food just not to the CC's taste which shies away from desserts in general.

Spicy Japanese Crack (in red and green)

There is a spicy Japanese condiment called yuzukoshō (柚子こしょう) which consists of yuzu peel and chilli peppers which are then fermented.

It is very spicy (a little bit goes a long way), and has a strong citrusy scent from the yuzu peel. It takes on the color of the chilli peppers used — red chilli peppers yield an orange paste, and green chilli peppers yield a dull green paste.

Traditionally, it's used for nabemono dishes but its popularity means it's showing up everywhere.

This stuff is addictive. Once you use it you can't go back.

Keats

Food as a means of seduction. A theme as old as time.

Stanza XXX from the "The Eve of St. Agnes".

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

A Bad Wind

It is said that "it's an ill wind that blows no good", and sometimes that can be literally true.

The north-east experienced torrential rain and extreme flooding with Hurricane Irene but apparently there's a silver lining.

From NPR: Irene Aftermath: When It Rains, It Spores.

When Hurricane Irene tore through the Northeast last month, it caused severe flooding and damage to homes, trees and power lines. But it also left behind something rather delicate: mushrooms.

Foragers say they've seen more fungi in the past few weeks than ever before.

There are more than 1,000 mushroom varieties in these woods, McDonagh says, but she eats only about 24 of them. She recommends taking a course on edible fungi before foraging alone.

The CC is a proud member of the New York Mycological Society ("only society that has had zero deaths, and we 'plan to keep it that way'") and goes foraging from time to time. However, he was not aware of this tendency for mushrooms to sprout after summer storms (although it makes perfect logical sense in hindsight.)

Oh well! There will be more storms in the years to come ...

Spicy Tingly Peanuts

The CC received these in the mail as a gift. They are totally addictive - your mouth is on fire, all tingly and numb from the Sichuan peppercorns and all you can think of is you need some more.

Fall is Here!

Last tomatoes of the season. Still amazing, and you can cook up a storm without the house turning into a sauna.

Pesto Trapanese

While the traditional pesto is from Liguria, this one is from Trapani in Sicily.

It's made with the typical products of the region — almonds, tomatoes, chilli peppers. You can see both the medieval and North African influences in this dish.

It's simple yet sultry in that summery way.

Ingredients

1/2 cup almonds (blanched, skins removed)
1 clove garlic
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp grated Pecorino
1/2 cup (tightly packed) mint leaves
2 dried red chilli peppers
4 tomatoes (peeled, cored, diced)
1 tsp sea salt

Recipe

Put all the ingredients in a food processor, and process till blended. Leave it slightly grainy so that it has some consistency.

Toss with long-strand pasta that has been drained, and is still hot.

Serve immediately.

The Syncretic Culture

If there is a a single word that could be used to sum up Filipino culture, the word would be "syncretism".

Over the millenia, the islands that now comprise the Philippine nation have encountered a myriad of cultures and synthesized them into a coherent whole. The influences range from Malay, China, Indonesia and Japan (geography), to India and the Arab world (trade routes and conquest), to Spain and America (colonial.)

In an increasingly post-modern world — "Sushi and Coca-Cola" — as a friend of the CC's so memorably put it; it is extraordinarily surprising that a syncretic food culture should not just be unknown but invisible to the point of surprise when it is mentioned.

There are primarily three reasons for this.

The first that hits the tongue directly is that Filipino food lacks a sharp flavor profile. There is nothing that "hits" you in the way that, say, Thai food does. Instead, the emphasis is on extraordinarily fresh ingredients prepared simply.

This makes it doubly ironic since the phrase "extraordinarily fresh ingredients prepared simply" could equally well be attached to Italian food which has been the subject of food fetishization for the last twenty years.

In an increasingly super-marketized world, it is simply not possible to experience the absolute wondrous nature of this food. In fact, one could argue that in large cities like Manila, this nature has been lost for a very long time.

The CC ate the most magical pork grilled with nothing but salt in the rural Philippines. The pig had been freshly slaughtered. Two days later, it was prepared again on the CC's request but it was nowhere near as good.

The explanation?

My sister prepared it. She doesn't know how to do it. She washed the meat but it's the blood that gives it the taste."

You can absolutely forget about eating stuff like this in a super-market world. In short, you are unlikely to have a "Filipino food experience" unless you actually use the absolutely best ingredients that money can buy. When done right, it should rightfully blow your brains out even lacking the afore-mentioned sharp flavor profile.

The second reason, and this comes from the simple fact that almost any great food culture is the food of poverty. Not only is there an extraordinary "waste-not, want-not" attitude to food but that there is positive celebration of offal.

(Incidentally, the Spaniards amped up this already ingrained agrarian logic, particularly the love of pork, to unprecedented levels.)

Given conventional food mores towards the "nasty bits" then, there seems to be this ick-factor that a lot of people will have to overcome.

(You can read Fuchsia Dunlop talk about the same phenomenon in the context of traditional Chinese cuisines.)

In Filipino culture, every organ is not just eaten but celebrated. Tuna jaw, tuna ovaries, pig lungs, pig offal in pig's blood, you name it. There's a dish. When mentioned, there's almost always a wistful sigh, "Oh, I miss that." (which has its own sentimental ick-factor, "Didn't we just eat that last night? How can you miss it?")

Since we live in a world of increasing offal-fetishization, this argument is going to become increasingly irrelevant. In five years when offal goes mainstream, that will be the time when the hoi-polloi "discover" Filipino food.

The third and very likely, the dominant reason of the invisibility of Filipino food, is that they have never had in the entirety of their history, a firm royalty. Sure, there have been local rulers and chieftains but there has never been an Emperor.

It may come as a surprise that an accident of history like that would have profound consequences on how we eat today but it does. Cultures that have had a firm sense of royalty and there are many -- French, Thai, Italian, Japanese, Indian, Chinese -- have not only a history of "fine dining" but an entire cadre of dishes that effectively migrated "top-down". From the Emperor downwards to the royal classes and then downwards to the middle-classes. Additionally, there is a very strong sense of what constitutes "fine dining", and a sense of how to go about it.

Modern restaurant culture at the highest end is nothing more than a generalization of royal cuisine. In short, you are still a slave to the whimsies of an emperor of a country that you have never visited and whose name you still don't know.

The pursuit of food as an active object of desire, discussion, detail has always been something that could only be pursued by the relatively well-off. That it even shows up in mass culture (TV shows, food porn!) is based on the fact that we are extraordinarily more economically productive than people in the 16th century. The average person can afford to waste their time in a pursuit that goes beyond daily sustenance. The Industrial Revolution has done its job, and extraordinarily well to boot.

If you were not particularly flush with money in older times, and wanted to eat great food, presentation and all, the only mechanism open to you would have to know someone a member of the elite, and be invited to dine at their table. The elite, after all, have always had their servants to make their food. Excellence was expected as a routine matter of course. If they were bored of the ordinary excellence that came out of their own kitchen, they would just finagle an invitation to dine at their friends' places where they would encounter an ordinary excellence that was totally different from their routine ordinary excellence.

(On a side note, that's why great artists with patrons have always eaten well. They may not be from the elite themselves but the influence rubbed off.)

In the Philippines, this sense of "older times" would be a scant twenty or thirty years ago. The food culture is still evolving because of the absence of a strong sense of royalty and a mechanism of presenting the cuisine. Thankfully, the modern world via its restaurant culture is doing its job, and increasingly in the places where money is flush, you see Filipino cuisine presented in all its glory.

The aging conservative Rimsky-Korsakov once warned his budding student, Stravinsky, about the strange delightful harmonies in Debussy's music -- "Better not listen to him, otherwise you risk getting accustomed to it, and you might even like it."

"Better not eat Filipino food, otherwise you risk getting accustomed to it, and you might even like it."

The Power of Chickpeas

Abu el-Heidja has deflowered in one night
Once eighty virgins, and he did not eat or drink between,
Because he surfeited himself with chickpeas,
And had drunk camel's milk with honey mixed.

(Source: The Perfumed Garden of Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi.)

Ginataang Hipon

This was the single best home-cooked meal that the CC had in the Philippines.


It doesn't get simpler than this but it's a flavor complex. Texture from the fresh bamboo shoots, corn and shrimp, flavor from the coconut milk and the fresh chilli leaves, color from the shrimp, corn, and chilli leaves, umami from the fish sauce (patis.)

It's a flat-out masterpiece.

Tuna

Euphemistically, called "tuna collar" in English, it's the jaw of the tuna (panga in Tagalog.)

So incredibly delicious you have no idea. Sushi lovers step up to the plate. This one was marinaded in garlic and ginger before being grilled on a lonely beach on a deserted island.

Eaten with calamansi, soy sauce and hot chilli peppers (not shown.)

The CC still dreams about it!

Heat Quotient

Hotter than Brangelina fucking on a rickety tin terrace. Nine and half pounds of tomatoes - the lust, the lust!

The Acquisitions

Vast quantities of dried anchovies (bulinaw), tiny dried shrimp, organic sugarcane vinegar from Ilocos(sukang iloko), calamansi jam, and crab roe fat (taba ng talangka.)

The last is a Filipino specialty which is both utterly delicious and heart-cloggingly fatty.

Coconuts & Aliens

Coconut trees are known to bear "alien mutant" coconuts. They contain much more flesh, and almost no liquid coconut water. Instead, it contains a gelatinous gel-like substance, and the coconut meat is only loosely adhered to the hard kernel.

These "mutant coconuts" are called macapuno in Tagalog and they are a delicacy. (The regular coconuts are called niyog.)

It's easy enough to figure out which coconuts are macapuno by tapping them since they have a markedly different density structure and will "sound" different.


Once a coconut tree bears a macapuno, it will continue to bear some fraction of its fruits in that form.

Human ingenuity being what it is, we can now breed trees that will yield these alien coconuts with 80% probability.

The flesh is "meatier", "stringier" and tastes quite different from regular coconuts. It's frequently used in desserts by boiling them in sugar syrup.

Delicious!!!